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[wierd]

A prius has a battery.

If you live on a dirt road, you drive into town, right?

What percentage of your commute is on a paved road?  Is your percentage of travel on a dirt road significantly more than the battery drive distance of a prius?

[Orange Wizard]

Unless we get people on board with the idea of enlightened despotisms.

[wierd]

It doesnt take despotism to have such things.

[Orange Wizard]

Not specifically, but we're trying to convince a lot of very rich people that they should spend a lot of their money now so that everyone can be happier/healthier/wealthier further down the track. That is very hard to do when those rich people have political and legal influence and are unwilling to part with muh cash dollars.

[wierd]

Which is what I insulted, with the "Dont make me pay for it daddy! It hurts my wallet!" quip.

[Shadowlord]

My point is that the town fails to find the money to pave the road every year, and instead it requires repeated maintenance because it's a road of dirt and gains potholes practically every time it rains.

In the end they're spending more not paving it.

[wierd]

It would be financially infeasible to do this to ALL roads.

You dont NEED to though, because electric cars have batteries.


Currently, the batteries in electric cars are nowhere near comparable to the drive time afforded by a simple tank of gas. However, if major traffic arteries (the roads that have to be torn up and resurfaced every 10 years anyway, because of all the damage they endure from heavy axles and other abuse) were equipped with this, the electric vehicle could tap the roadbed for energy, as if it were driving while plugged in. In fact, it might even be able to recharge a partially depleted battery while in transit.

So, if a significant portion of your commute is on a major artery, even with the less spectacular electric vehicle we have now, if we adopted such a technology, we could still eliminate gasoline engine powered cars, and still accommodate rural residents fine.

At this level, it becomes the burden of cities to equip major metro arteries, and state govts to equip major highway arteries.

Barring cities like New York or other places where vehicles spend lots of time deadlocked in traffic on side streets, this would be an effective solution.

[Orange Wizard]

Yes, it is an excellent idea, but the people in charge aren't going to want to pay for it.
As another example, the NZ government rejected a proposal to build a big rail system across the South Island a couple of years back. It would have been fantastic, both financially and environmentally, for everyone concerned, but the capital required was slightly higher than some people would have liked, so we never saw anything, and now various districts are complaining about not having enough money to keep roads maintained, and traffic is worse than ever.

[wierd]

Yup.

It isn't that we CANT do this.

It is that doing so will cost just a little bit more than doing nothing. (But dont worry, the costs of climate change are compounding, not one-time. I suspect that once they start getting burned by it in a real sense, the outcry will be so great that they can no longer ignore it.)

[smjjames]

Yup.

It isn't that we CANT do this.

It is that doing so will cost just a little bit more than doing nothing. (But dont worry, the costs of climate change are compounding, not one-time. I suspect that once they start getting burned by it in a real sense, the outcry will be so great that they can no longer ignore it.)

However, it also needs politicians to realize what is happening and fix for the long term rather than go 'oh hey lets fix this a little bit to satisfy people'.

Humanity as a species has the technological capacity to survive basically anything nature throws at us. The problem is that it's difficult and will require massive changes to our way of life.
The point of addressing climate change is so that we only need to make relatively small changes now, as opposed to completely screwing over our descendants.

Actually, we don't even neccesarily need modern technology either. Heck, prehistoric peoples colonized all kinds of environments, even eked out an existence along the edges of the Atacama.

Modern technology just makes it a heck of a lot easier with more options and flexibility.

[andrea]

yes, humans are crafty and will survive. I really really doubt we will face extintion.
That, of course, doesn't mean it will be a pleasant survival.

I remember a carbon calculator some time ago which said that the biggest single action you could take to reduce carbon footprint would be... eating less beef and more chicken. Cows are terrible with emission.
that calculator even claimed that switching entirely from beef to white meats globally would be enough to keep warming below 2 °C. never got around to checking the enormous page of sources however.

good thing I don't eat beef and love chicken for unrelated reasons

[redwallzyl]

we don't need charging roads we have battery's that work perfectly fine for the vast majority of commutes. they are just a bit to expensive right now. that hopefully wont be for to long as musk is building his supper battery factory to double the global supply of lithium ion battery's. i do like that guy hes awesome.

[mainiac]

That, of course, doesn't mean it will be a pleasant survival.

People have a hard time understanding what horrible is.  Millions  of preventable deaths is horrible but we just shrug and get on with our lives as it happens slowly over decades.  We change our baseline as we go.

[Shadowlord]

supper battery factory

Now imagining a factory that produces battleship cannons which launch suppers encased in protective rubber cannonballs. For rapid delivery of humanitarian assistance!

[mainiac]

  Humanitarian assistance is better delivered by microwave lasers from space.